An achievement kindred to R. Crumb’s Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.
In his first graphic novel, one classic artist channels another.
With all due respect to Dante, this is Chwast’s Divine Comedy, one that uses the poet’s masterwork as a launching pad for a flight to the creative heavens. An influential, revolutionary illustrator, Chwast (Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast, 2009, etc.) meets his match in one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Distilling Dante’s three volumes into little more than 100 pages of large panels (many of them page-sized), he adheres to the tri-partite structure of the original without overburdening the spirit with reverence. Chwast’s Dante has a jaunty fedora and a pipe clenched between his teeth; his Virgil is a bespectacled Brit with a bowler; his Beatrice has the beauty of a classic Hollywood glamour girl. Thus, just as Dante wrote in the Italian vernacular of his day at a time when Latin was the language of philosophy and religion, Chwast has recast the work in today’s vernacular of graphic narrative, sacrificing the literary poetry of the original for visual imagery that is thoroughly accessible. From the boiling river of blood and the rain of excrement in the circles of hell through the ascent into heaven’s ineffable beauty (as with Dante, the transitional stage of purgatory is less compelling than the extremes), the artist makes the Divine Comedy irresistibly comic and inspirationally transcendent.
An achievement kindred to R. Crumb’s Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-084-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gorgeous symphony.
Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.
McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.
A gorgeous symphony.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-40650-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.
This black-and-white historical narrative, written and illustrated by Lutes, collects eight volumes of his ongoing comic book set in Berlin during the late ’20s. It’s a multilayered tale of love and politics at the beginning of the Nazi era, as Lutes follows the stories of three characters: a 20ish art student from the provinces, a textile worker, and a young Jewish radical. Their lives intersect in only the subtlest way—Lutes depicts them crossing paths at some great public events, such as the Mayday march that closes this part of his book. And Lutes plays with perspective in a visual sense as well, jumping from point-of-view frames to overhead angles, including one from a dirigible flying above in honor of the Kaiser. At street level, Lutes integrates his historical research smoothly, and cleverly evokes the sounds and smells of a city alive with public debate and private turmoil. The competing political factions include communists, socialists, democrats, nationalists, and fascists, and all of Lutes’s characters get swept up by events. Marthe, the beautiful art student, settles in with Kurt, the cynical and detached journalist; Gudrun, the factory worker, loses her job, and her nasty husband (to the Nazi party), then joins a communist cooperative with her young daughters; Schwartz, a teenager enamored with the memory of Rosa Luxembourg, balances his incipient politics with his religion at home and his passion for Houdini. The lesser figures seem fully realized as well, from the despotic art instructor to the reluctant street policeman. Cosmopolitan Berlin on the brink of disaster: Lutes captures the time and place with a historian’s precision and a cinematographer’s skill. His shifts from close-ups to fades work perfectly in his thin-line style, a crossbreed of dense-scene European comics and more simple comics styles on this side of the Atlantic.
An original project worth watching as it shapes up to something that may be quite magnificent.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-896597-29-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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